Nyima Tashi: Bringing Tibet closer to the world

Nyima Tashi, born in June 1964 in Lhasa, capital city of southwest China's Tibet, is praised by the media as being the "father of Tibet's Tibetan information technology" and "alchemist of Tibet's information revolution". His hard work can be summed up in one sentence: bringing Tibet closer to the world, giving the world a better understanding of Tibet and familiarizing Tibet with the world.

From a young age, Nyima Tashi loved reading popular science magazines and various science fiction novels. He knew that a fantastic machine exists in the world – the computer – and he was very keen to see how it works. Later, Nyima Tashi chose to study computer science at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, east China.

In 1988 Nyima Tashi came to teach at the Tibet University. He drew on his studies to develop Tibet University's first computer science personnel management system.

Tibetan writing goes from top to bottom and left to right, and is a kind of alphabetic writing with a two-dimensional structure. Before the standards were set for Tibetan characters, Tibetan information processing was difficult and could not be exchanged, which heavily restricted the informationization and modernization of the Tibetan language.

Between 1994 and 1997, Nyima Tashi led a research team in researching and drawing up the international standards for "Tibetan coded character sets for information interexchange". Finally, through deeply analysing the laws of Tibetan grammar and writing, and drawing on other writing coding technique, they innovatively proposed using Tibetan basic characters and character combinations to encode all Tibetan writing technique. In July 1997, the proposal was formally established by the International Organization for Standardization as the international standard for "Tibetan coded character sets for information interexchange", giving Tibetan language the status of being the first ethnic minority language in China to form an international standard.

It can be said that Nyima Tashi was the first to engage in computer study and teaching in Tibet. In addition to teaching, he also chose to develop Tibetan software. Nyima Tashi has spent three decades in the academic field, building the basic theory of Tibetan information technology and Tibetan computing linguistics. He made a breakthrough with the key technologies related to Tibetan natural language processing and filled a number of research gaps in the Tibetan information technology field.